(Above: The Small Family Christmas Tree, circa 2001. And yes, I realize that even though I rail about the over-commercialization of Christmas in this essay, I have a few obvious commercial-type ornaments on my tree. Look, I never said I was perfect...)

There are those moments in every man’s life which are destined to live forever in his memory, no matter how hard he may try to forget. For me, the day after Thanksgiving 1995 certainly proved to be such a memory…

I was sitting at my desk th...

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Between my job at the newspaper and being busy trying to complete a fiction story I'd been invited to write for an upcoming anthology I haven't had much time to even think about this blog here of late. But I didn't realize how long it had been until I got a message this morning asking "Why no new posts?" So I thought I'd pop in just long enough to let the 3 or 4 who pay attention to this blog know I'm still here, and to share another of my fantasy movie posters. This is one I did back in 2003...
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Another of the fake covers I've created using Photoshop in recent years. Wanted to do something with Buckaroo Banzai because I was such a fan of both the film and the novelization. I know it's silly, but I really enjoy doing little things like this for my own amusement and when I come up with one I think is worth sharing I like to do so. 
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Here's another fantasy cover I created... this one was done way back when GWB was still president and I wishing on a daily basis that he was not, but that's a troy for another time. The thing I liked about this one was planting a teaser in the corner for an article purporting to tell about the "Eugenics Wars." Kind of silly I suppose but, hey, I like it that way.
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Ran across a thread on www.moviefanfare.com yesterday where guest blogger Peter Eramo, Jr shared his own personal top five celebrity crushes - stars who, to use his own words, "are simply hot, hot, hot!"

It was an interesting list to say the least. Not surprisingly it included three current celebrities - Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel and Christina Hendricks - two of which I have to admit have never done much for me. (I'll leave it to others to figure out which two.) I was impressed t find...

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This is just a silly little thing I did for laughs back when I was first starting to really learn how to use Photoshop. Came across a piece of cover art from one of those "spicy pulp story" magazines from the 1930s and decided to create my own version. Used Mary Tyler Moore as the cover model because I had such a crush on her when I was a kid; did you ever see the way she just kind of pulls away her pearl necklace and smiles as she exits the final scene of the very first episode of The Dick V...
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Flipping through the television channels some years back, I stumbled upon a television news program which had devoted its entire hour to examining what has apparently one of the most popular religions in modern America.

One segment of the program which particularly fascinated me followed four members of this faith as they travelled about their own personal version of Mecca, pausing at various shrines to pay tribute to the object of their earnest devotion: a statue bearing his likeness, the p...

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(Photo: My son William in front of Tony Packo's Cafe in Toledo, Ohio - August 1, 2011)

 

You know, at the outset it really didn’t seem like all that difficult a task to undertake. After all, all we were trying to do was find our way to a restaurant.

Well, okay, not just any restaurant. We were on the hunt for Tony Packo’s Cafe – renowned throughout the land as the favorite eatery of that legendary American veteran of the Korean War, Maxwell Q. Klinger.

Maybe I’d better start at the be...

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(Note: The following originally appeared as one of my newspaper columns a few years back. With another high school football season quickly approaching, it seemed like a good time to share it here.)

Once upon a time - and yet not really all that long ago, if you stop to think about it - all it really took for the boys in the neighborhood to have a good time was an empty lot, the proper equipment, enough fellows to make up two full teams, and one captain willing to let Little Brother Tag-Along p...

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When I was a little boy, there were two heroes that I really looked up to.

The first was my father. Well, I suppose that’s typical enough…every little boy I ever knew wanted to grow up and be just like his old man, and all the little girls wanted to be like their mommies. That is, until all those little boys and girls grew into teenagers, and suddenly Mommy and Daddy were somehow transformed (if only for a brief time) into Mother and Father. The Dreaded Enemies.

The other great hero of ...

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There's a great blog - http://braveandboldlost.blogspot.com - manned by a fellow who does a killer job of creating his own team-up comic book covers. He originally did a series of imaginary "Brave And The Bold" team-ups between Batman and a myriad of guest stars you'd have to see to believe; more recently he set Batman aside to concentrate on a new series of "Marvel Two-In-One" covers featuring The Thing in similar team-up situations. I was glancing through the site today after not having had...
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This is a picture I cobbled together on Photoshop just for fun a few years back. Always kinda liked this one, silly as it is...
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As long as we're on the subject of "Star Trek," let me begin by stating that there's a story behind the above illustration...

Back in 2000, as much for my own amusement as anything else, I wrote an essay entitled "The Eugenics War Declassified," in which I attempted to explain how the Eugenic Wars first mentioned in a 1966 "Star Trek" episode could have still occurred given what had actually transpired historically during the intervening years. As a fan of Philip José Farmer and his Wold Ne...

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 (Note: The above picture is my son William standing in front of the original model of the USS Enterprise at the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum during or visit to Washington D.C. in 2009)


 

“I didn’t know you were a Trekkie, Small.”

The comment was made by my boss one day a number of years ago as he happened to overhear a conversation I was having with a co-worker. We were talking about the film “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” which I found (and still find) to...

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With this year's FarmerCon - the annual celebration honoring famed science fiction writer (and friend) Philip José Farmer - just around the corner, I thought I'd share this photograph taken at the first FarmerCon I attended at Phil's house back in 2007. This is me with award-winning SF-horror-western author Joe Lansdale together in the library in Phil's basement, where we and other PJF friends and fans gathered to talk about Phil and the impact his work has had our lives both personally and ...
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(Note: The following was my entry in a contest Time magazine held in the late 1990s - I forget the exact year right off - in which the publication asked its readers to submit ideas for an episode of a television series in which characters from another series make an appearance. The winner was some dummy that had Homer SImpson turning up on an episode of "E.R." I still like MY idea better....)

*      *      *

Dear Time:

My name is John Small. I live in Ravia, Oklahoma, and the following is ...

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(Note: This is a paper I wrote for my Introduction to Poetry class in college back in 1988. The assignment, as I recall, had to do with using what we had learned about delving into the deeper meaning of poems and applying it to popular songs; the professor assigned each of us a different song and, knowing that I was a Beatles fan, he gave me "Eleanor Rigby". He made a point of saying later that he didn't really agree with my interpretation of the piece, but gave me an "A" anyway. I don't know...
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Awhile back some of my fellow posters over at The Kingston Trio Place (http://www.kingstontrioplace.com/) were discussing what actors might have been cast in a movie about the popular folk group had such a film been made back in the 1960s. I liked a couple of the names that were tossed about and made this fake poster to advertise their dream project. Went over well enough that I thought I'd re-post it here.
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Came across this old file that I wrote back in college (circa about 1989 or '90) as part of a "fanzine" a buddy an I put together. This is probably my first real attempt at Phil Farmer-style creative mythography (it probably shows) and as such set the stage for so much that has happened in my life since then.

So without further ado...


 THE QUESTOR FILES

By John Allen Small

On occasion in various regions of the planet Earth during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there we...

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Following my good buddy Win Eckert's example, I thought every now and again I'd post some picture that I feel worth sharing. We'll start with this thing I did a while back while fooling around on Photoshop trying to keep myself entertained...
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I was digging through some old files the other night and ran across something I wrote that suddenly seemed noteworthy again in light of our most recent celebrity controversy... 

It was written in response to a lengthy discussion amongst members of the New Wold Newton Meteorics Society concerning an article in the July 7, 1999 edition of Variety in which it had been announced that former actor, former governor and philandering husband Arnold Schwarzenegger was planning to star as Doc Savage i...

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Somebody once told me that I didn’t have any culture.

It happened way back during my college days, but I remember the incident as vividly as if it were yesterday. Some classmates and I took a trip up to Chicago one weekend (apparently it was one of those all-too-rare weekends when none of us had any term papers to write), and while we were there one of our number suggested that we pay a visit to one of the city’s famed art galleries.

I didn’t really want to go. To be honest, I don’t...

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